Quotes from Eudora Welty

It's always taken a lot out of me, being smart.

A whole tree of lightning stood in the sky. She kept looking out the window, suffused with the warmth from the fire and with the pity and beauty and power of her death. The thunder rolled.

I'm a great reader that never has time to read.

Children, like animals use all their senses to discover the world. Then artists come along and discover it the same way...Or now and then we'll hear from an artisit who's never lost it.

Art, though, is never the voice of a country; it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the art that speaks it most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction; in particular, the novel.

Writing is an expression of the writer's own peculiar personality, could not help being so. Yet in reading great works one feels that the finished piece transcends the personal. All writers great and small must sometimes have felt that they have become part of what they wrote even more than it still remains a part of them.

Then the light changed the water, until all about them the woods in the rising wind seemed to grow taller and blow inward together and suddenly turn dark. The rain struck heavily. A huge tail seemed to lash through the air and the river broke in a wound of silver.

The difficulty that accompanies you is less like the dark than a trusted lantern to see your way by.

At their very feet had been the river. The boat came breasting out of the mist, and in they stepped. All new things in life were meant to come like that.

He loved happiness like I love tea.

The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive.

It's all right, I want to say to the students who write to me, for things to be what they appear to be, and for words to mean what they say. It's all right, too, for words and appearances to mean more than one thing--ambiguity is a fact of life.

Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write more entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page.

The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order.

Both reading and writing are experiences--lifelong-- in the course of which we who encounter words used in certain ways are persuaded by them to be brought mind and heart within the presence, the power, of the imagination.

I don't know whether I could do either one, reading or writing, without the other

But how much better, in any case, to wonder than not to wonder, to dance with astonishment and go spinning in praise, than not to know enough to dance or praise at all; to be blessed with more imagination than you might know at the given moment what to do with than to be cursed with too little to give you -- and other people -- any trouble.

You know, sir, this operation is not, in any hands, a hundred percent predictable? Well, I'm an optimist. I didn't know there were any more such animals, said Dr. Courtland. Never think you've seen the last of anything

For there is hate as well as love, she supposed, in the coming together and continuing of our lives.

To write honestly and with all our powers is the least we can do, and the most.

Once you're into a story everything seems to apply- what you overhear on a city bus is exactly what your character would say on the page you're writing. Wherever you go, you meet a part of your story. I guess you're tuned in for it, and the right things are sort of magnetized.

The first act of insight is throw away the labels. In fiction, while we do not necessarily write about ourselves, we write out of ourselves, using ourselves; what we learn from, what we are sensitive to, what we feel strongly about--these become our characters and go to make our plots. Characters in fiction are conceived from within, and they have, accordingly, their own interior life; they are individuals every time.

Up home we loved a good storm coming, we'd fly outdoors and run up and down to meet it," her mother used to say. "We children would run as fast as we could go along the top of that mountain when the wind was blowing, holding our arms right open. The wilder it blew the better we liked it.

Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists.